LBN *agenda* Blog

Will Sacha Baron Cohen’s PR Shtick Sink His New Movie ‘The Dictator’?

by Chris Lee :

Earlier this month, Sacha Baron Cohen did something risky, questionable, and with few precedents in his wildly outré career—which is saying a lot considering the movie comedian has carved a living out of scandalizing America with his ambush docu-comedies and the cartoonish antics of his scabrous alter egos.

This is the actor, after all, who dressed down as the hapless Kazakh journalist Borat to coax drunken frat boys into admitting wishes of owning slaves, who bungee-jumped ass-first onto rapper Eminem’s face (as the swishy Austrian fashionista Bruno) and dumped an urn of Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il’s supposed ashes on Ryan Seacrest (as the Dictator—more on that in a minute).

But earlier this month, Baron Cohen did the nearly unthinkable. He was interviewed on The Howard Stern Show as himself, not deeply immersed in character as Baron Cohen has done for every other media engagement in support of his new comedy The Dictator, which arrives in theaters Wednesday.

Out of respect for Stern, who Baron Cohen says inspired him, the comedian spoke straightforwardly and un-ironically in his native British accent, absent the kinky weird beard associated with his Saddam Hussein–esque character, Admiral General Shabazz Aladeen, and spouting none of the faux despot’s characteristically sexist and racist gibberish. “I’ve never really done interviews as myself,” Cohen said. “This is like the third time in my life I’ve done an interview out of character.”

Paramount, the studio releasing The Dictator, has taken this gambit a step further, predicating the brunt of its publicity efforts on the accepted wisdom that Aladeen is a real person with a functioning Twitter account (@RepublicWadiya) and that Wadiya is an actual North African nation with a website touting the dictator’s friendship with other iron-fisted rulers (hence a Photo-shopped picture of Aladeen with the late Libyan Col. Muammar Gaddafi and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival). There’s even a Dictator College Bus Tour educating North American students on “key issues such as the woman’s place in this man’s world, how to appropriately honor The Dictator, and why the West needs his guidance.”

But the Stern appearance managed to illuminate a core truth about the wall-to-wall Baron Cohen–as–Aladeen publicity blitz: it doesn’t always have to be this way. While Baron Cohen certainly prefers to let his comic creations do all the talking, he is—when he wants to be—willing and capable of dropping the shtick.

Making Life Fair

By John Stossel

When my wife was a liberal, she complained that libertarian reasoning is coldhearted. Since markets produce winners and losers — and many losers did nothing wrong — market competition is cruel. It must seem so. President Obama used the word “fair” in his last State of the Union address nine times.

We are imprinted to prefer a world that is “fair.” Our close relatives the chimpanzees freak out when one chimp gets more than his fair share, so zookeepers are careful about food portions. Chimps are hardwired to get angry when they think they’ve been cheated — and so are we.

Filmmaker Michael Moore took this notion about fairness to its intuitive conclusion during an interview with Laura Flanders of GRITtv, saying of rich people’s fortunes: “That’s not theirs! That’s a national resource! That’s ours!” As is typical, Moore was confused or disingenuous. In our corporatist economy, some fortunes are indeed made illegitimately though political means. The privileges that produce those fortunes should be abolished. But contrary to Moore, incomes are not “national resources.” If he’s concerned with illegitimate fortunes, he should favor freeing markets.

Fairness is related to justice, the recognition of people’s rights to their own lives.

A free market will create big differences in wealth. That wealth disparity is simply a byproduct of freedom — vastly diverse individuals competing to serve consumers will arrive at vastly diverse outcomes.

That disparity is not unfair — if it results from free exchange.

The free market (which, sadly, America doesn’t have) is fair. It also produces better outcomes. Even “losers” do pretty well.

A more astute observer than Moore might show how unfair government intervention is. Licenses, taxes, regulations and corporate subsidies make it harder for the average worker to start his own business, to go from being a “little guy” to being an independent owner of means of production. Most new businesses fail, but running your own business is the best route to prosperity and — surveys suggest — happiness, too.

I once opened a dinky business called “The Stossel Store” in Delaware, hawking hats, books and other goodies on the street. It was hard to open this store. I chose Delaware because it’s supposedly the state that makes that easiest — but “easiest” didn’t mean “easy.” I still required help from Fox’s lawyers to get the permits, and the process took more than a week. In my hometown, New York City, it would have taken much longer.

By contrast, in Hong Kong, I started a business in one day. Hong Kong’s limited government makes it easy for people to try things, and that has allowed poor people to prosper. Regular people benefit most from economic freedom.

What makes it hard for people to embrace markets is that anti-market zealots, with their talk of Americans pulling together to take care of one another, remind us of the coziness of village life. Instinct tells us that’s where we’ll find trust — and fairness.

But our intuition fools us when it leads us to think that government models that institutionalize what resembles village life must be good. Assuming that government can foster togetherness better than our own voluntary associations, businesses and private charities leads to coziness of the bad kind: back-room dealings between the well-connected and government.

If we’re going to have a large-scale, modern society, we need relatively simple rules that respect individual rights and that can be applied to all sorts of new situations without having to put global commerce on hold until the hypothetical village elders come up with a plan.

Since most human beings still lived as farmers two centuries ago, the idea of stranger-filled cosmopolitan life outside the small, close-knit village is still novel. It was only around the 18th and 19th centuries that the ideas we now think of as classical liberalism, libertarianism, anarchism and laissez faire began to be articulated. As Westerners became accustomed to living without the rule of kings, aristocrats and village elders, they began, for the first time since the dawn of writing, to imagine living ungoverned lives.

Sure, it’s scary, but surrendering your fate to politicians and bureaucrats is a lot scarier.

Dancing With Derivatives

By MAUREEN DOWD

Jamie Dimon calls it “a doozy.”

And it was. A $2 billion credit derivatives trading bungle that could mushroom to a $4 billion loss.

The shining industry agitator against some of the tougher regulations on banks has suddenly become the shining example of why still tougher regulations may be needed.

After the economy nearly atomized in a cloud of cupidity, Dimon became known as America’s least-hated banker. But now the blunt 56-year-old Queens native who snowed Democrats in Washington with all his talk about not lumping in “good banks” with “bad banks” has fallen off his pedestal.

If Jamie the Great and his “good bank” can make such a gigantic blunder, sending déjà vu shivers down America’s back, what hope is there for lesser bankers?

As Noam Scheiber writes in The New Republic, “we now have ironclad proof — as if we really needed it — that everyone is capable of disastrous stupidity.”

Dimon doesn’t buy the argument that bosses of big, complex companies can never make mistakes. A smart quarterback still needs great defensive ends, as he puts it, or the guy who runs McDonald’s can’t ensure all the meat is fresh.

Britain has been rocked by a “shareholder spring,” a revolution of ordinarily placid investors vetoing bloated executive pay deals and bonuses. Three top executives of British firms were sacked in revolts of shareholders, who also rose up against giving new executives millions in “golden hellos.”

As a pay advisory body crisply put it, “It is unclear how a golden hello benefits shareholders.”

It is redolent of the classic movie “The Solid Gold Cadillac,” with Judy Holliday as a scrappy small stockholder, challenging the board of directors about fat salaries and dubious policies.

With C.E.O. pay going stratospheric as workers’ pay grew stagnant, anger was bound to erupt.

Yet there wasn’t much ire at the JPMorgan Chase annual shareholders meeting in Tampa on Tuesday. It was over quickly and painlessly, despite — or maybe because of — Dimon’s admission on “Meet the Press” that his team was “sloppy” and “stupid” and used “bad judgment” in incurring the loss, which has led to the rolling of three heads at the bank, an F.B.I. investigation, and a Congressional ramp-up for more chiding hearings.

Talking even faster than usual, the tarnished silver-haired banker told shareholders that he couldn’t justify the “self-inflicted” debacle. While the trade was “poorly vetted and poorly executed,” he said it wouldn’t make a dent in the “fortress balance sheet.”

A few shareholders asked pointed but polite questions, but most supported Dimon. “We think you are doing a fabulous job,” one Tampa shareholder told the C.E.O. Outside, a paltry 20 protesters gathered.

The Rev. Seamus Finn, representing shareholders from the Catholic organization Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, did gently press the boss: “We’re wondering, Mr. Dimon, given what we’ve learned, do you still believe a company can self-regulate when trading on their own accounts?” He added: “Furthermore, should our company really be spending shareholder funds on, some $7 million last year alone, on lobbying efforts to thwart the Dodd-Frank legislation and the work of regulators to write the rules stemming from that legislation?”

The priest concluded that the shareholders, “weary of mistakes” and pledges to reform, wonder if Dimon is listening.

But the group endorsed Dimon’s pay package of $23 million and let him keep his dual titles of chairman and C.E.O.

Dimon says he’s a “barely Democrat,” but he’s known as the favorite banker of the president, who called Dimon “one of the smartest bankers we got” on “The View” on Tuesday. President Obama’s financial disclosure report released on Tuesday showed a checking account at JPMorgan worth $500,000 to $1 million, and in 2010 the president defended Dimon’s $17 million bonus, on top of compensation in 2010 and 2011 of $23 million.

New York City’s chief audit officer is urging Dimon to “claw back” salary and bonuses paid to the top executives who dragged the bank into the excessive risk. That would be a first for Wall Street. Dimon says he is “likely” to do it, but is loath to “act like a judge and jury” with Ina Drew, the head of the investment office who resigned on Monday, given that she lost $2 billion on that deal while she was making $9 billion on others.

He knows he has to claw his way back to high regard.

“I never put myself on a pedestal,” he said. “You lose credibility, you have to earn it back. You have to earn respect every day. It’s never how great we are. It’s always the good, the bad and the ugly.”

Come the Revolution

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and he has a rather charming way of explaining how the new interactive online education company that he cofounded, Coursera, hopes to revolutionize higher education by allowing students from all over the world to not only hear his lectures, but to do homework assignments, be graded, receive a certificate for completing the course and use that to get a better job or gain admission to a better school.

“I normally teach 400 students,” Ng explained, but last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. “To reach that many students before,” he said, “I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years.”

Welcome to the college education revolution. Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. The costs of getting a college degree have been rising faster than those of health care, so the need to provide low-cost, quality higher education is more acute than ever. At the same time, in a knowledge economy, getting a higher-education degree is more vital than ever. And thanks to the spread of high-speed wireless technology, high-speed Internet, smartphones, Facebook, the cloud and tablet computers, the world has gone from connected to hyperconnected in just seven years. Finally, a generation that has grown up on these technologies is increasingly comfortable learning and interacting with professors through online platforms.

The combination of all these factors gave birth to Coursera.org, which launched on April 18, with the backing of Silicon Valley venture funds, as my colleague John Markoff first reported.

Private companies, like Phoenix, have been offering online degrees for a fee for years. And schools like M.I.T. and Stanford have been offering lectures for free online. Coursera is the next step: building an interactive platform that will allow the best schools in the world to not only offer a wide range of free course lectures online, but also a system of testing, grading, student-to-student help and awarding certificates of completion of a course for under $100. (Sounds like a good deal. Tuition at the real-life Stanford is over $40,000 a year.) Coursera is starting with 40 courses online — from computing to the humanities — offered by professors from Stanford, Princeton, Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania.

“The universities produce and own the content, and we are the platform that hosts and streams it,” explained Daphne Koller, a Stanford computer science professor who founded Coursera with Ng after seeing tens of thousands of students following their free Stanford lectures online. “We will also be working with employers to connect students — only with their consent — with job opportunities that are appropriate to their newly acquired skills. So, for instance, a biomedical company looking for someone with programming and computational biology skills might ask us for students who did well in our courses on cloud computing and genomics. It is great for employers and employees — and it enables someone with a less traditional education to get the credentials to open up these opportunities.”

M.I.T., Harvard and private companies, like Udacity, are creating similar platforms. In five years this will be a huge industry.

While the lectures are in English, students have been forming study groups in their own countries to help one another. The biggest enrollments are from the United States, Britain, Russia, India and Brazil. “One Iranian student e-mailed to say he found a way to download the class videos and was burning them onto CDs and circulating them,” Ng said last Thursday. “We just broke a million enrollments.”

To make learning easier, Coursera chops up its lectures into short segments and offers online quizzes, which can be auto-graded, to cover each new idea. It operates on the honor system but is building tools to reduce cheating.

In each course, students post questions in an online forum for all to see and then vote questions and answers up and down. “So the most helpful questions bubble to the top and the bad ones get voted down,” Ng said. “With 100,000 students, you can log every single question. It is a huge data mine.” Also, if a student has a question about that day’s lecture and it’s morning in Cairo but 3 a.m. at Stanford, no problem. “There is always someone up somewhere to answer your question” after you post it, he said. The median response time is 22 minutes.

These top-quality learning platforms could enable budget-strained community colleges in America to “flip” their classrooms. That is, download the world’s best lecturers on any subject and let their own professors concentrate on working face-to-face with students. Says Koller: “It will allow people who lack access to world-class learning — because of financial, geographic or time constraints — to have an opportunity to make a better life for themselves and their families.”

When you consider how many problems around the world are attributable to the lack of education, that is very good news. Let the revolution begin.

LBN-R.I.P.:

Harold A. Poling, the son of an auto mechanic who helped guide the Ford Motor Company through the recession of the early 1990s as its chairman and chief executive, died on Saturday in Pacific Grove, Calif. He was 86.

His death was announced by Ford, where Mr. Poling worked for 43 years before his retirement in 1994.

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Tanks, Jets or Scholarships?

By: Thomas L. Friedman

AMMAN, JORDAN

And so it came to pass that in 2012 – a year after the Arab awakening erupted – the United States made two financial commitments to the Arab world that each began with the numbers 1 and 3.

It gave Egypt’s military $1.3 billion worth of tanks and fighter jets, and it gave Lebanese public-school students a $13.5 million merit-based college scholarship program that is currently putting 117 Lebanese kids through local American-style colleges that promote tolerance, gender and social equality, and critical thinking. I’ve recently been to Egypt, and I’ve just been to Lebanon, and I can safely report this: The $13.5 million in full scholarships has already bought America so much more friendship and stability than the $1.3 billion in tanks and fighter jets ever will.

So how about we stop being stupid? How about we stop sending planes and tanks to a country where half the women and a quarter of the men can’t read, and start sending scholarships instead?

I am on a swing through the Arab world right now, and I am spending as much time as I can with public school-teachers and students – and as little time as possible with officials. It derives from my conviction about what really propelled the Tunis and Tahrir Square revolutions: Arab youths – 70 percent of this region is under 30 – who were humiliated and frustrated that they were being left behind. This Arab awakening was their way of saying: We want the freedom, the voice, the educational tools, the jobs and the uncorrupted government to realize our full potential. That’s what sparked this revolution.

Yes, the various Muslim Brotherhoods have exploited the opening created by these uprisings because they were the most organized parties. But if the Islamists don’t respond to the real drivers of this revolution – that yearning for education and jobs and the dignity they bring – they, too, will eventually face a rebellion.

If America wants to connect with the real aspirations of these revolutions, it will expand to other Arab awakening countries the $13.5 million U.S. Agency for International Development scholarship program begun in Lebanon. And, by the way, hats off to President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah and the members of Congress who got this program going.

Iran is building dams and roads around Lebanon, decorated with “Thank You, Iran” signs. But no one is standing in line here to go to Tehran University. They still line up for American scholarships, though – one requirement of which is that winners have to do community service, so we are also helping top build better citizens.

The American Embassy in Beirut introduced me to four of this year’s Lebanese scholarship students – who attend either the Lebanese Arab University or Haigazian University, which offer modern U.S.-style bachelor’s degrees.

Israa Yassin, 18, from the village of Qab Elias, who is studying computer science, told me: “This whole program is helping to make the youth capable of transforming this country into what it should be and can be. We are good, and we have the capabilities and we can do a lot, but we don’t get the chance. My brother just finished high school, and he could not afford [university]. His future is really stopped. The U.S. is giving us a chance to make a difference. I do believe if we are given the chance, we can excel. … We will not be underestimated anymore. It is really sad when you see a whole generation in Lebanese villages – hundreds of guys doing nothing – no work, not going to college.”

After getting the U.S. scholarship, said Yassin, “my family and my community feel differently about America. Why would they hate someone who is helping them?”

Word of the American scholarships has spread quickly; the program is now being swamped with applications for next year, a majority from young women. Wissal Chaaban, 18, from Tripoli, also attending the Lebanese Arab University and studying marketing, told me: “We have a lot of talent in the Middle East and young people do not feel appreciated. They feel their voice is shut down and not heard enough.”

This program is in America’s interest, she said, because it sends young people to colleges that “encourage openness, to accept the other, no matter how different, even if he was from another religion.”

I wish my government was giving more scholarships to Americans, but since we budget this money specifically for foreign aid, let’s use it intelligently. We can still give military aid – but in the right proportion.

While in Amman, I interviewed some public schoolteachers at Jordan’s impressive Queen Rania Teacher Academy, which works with a team from Columbia University to upgrade teaching skills. We talked about the contrast between the $13.5 million in U.S. scholarships and the $1.3 billion in military aid, and Jumana Jabr, an English teacher in an Amman public school, summed it up better than I ever could:

One is “for making people,” she said, “and the other is for killing people.” If America wants to spend money on training soldiers, she added, well, “teachers are also soldiers, so why don’t you spend the money training us? We’re the ones training the soldiers you’re spending the $1.3 billion on.”

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